Wednesday, October 22, 2008

GOP Economics: 'When a Parasite Kills Its Host'

McCain is lying to you about 'spreading the wealth around'. The fact is government taxes labor disproportionately and gives 'capital' a free ride. The GOP mission statement probably reads like this:

enrich the base of about one percent of the nation!

Anyone not rich enough to be among America's richest one percent is sorely deluded if it wastes a vote for anyone in the GOP --especially the increasingly demagogic campaign of Pain and McCain.

The GOP is really two parties: 1) the richest one percent of the nation which alone benefits from GOP policies, notably 'trickle down, tax cut' economics; 2) the GOP masses who kid themselves that by voting GOP, they too, will one day buy and retire to Boardwalk or Park Place. Clue: the game is rigged as long as the GOP maintains its ownership of the government.

Anyone who's played Monopoly knows that the game is over when one player bankrupts everyone else. Biologists, likewise, describe killer parasites who die when they kill their host. Like GOP 'bailout' politics, this is not a viable strategy. 'Free enterprise', as it is preached like gospel by the GOP ideologues, is simply no longer an option if the nation is to survive.

The government is not America! America is bigger and certainly better than the miserable bureaucracy of sell outs that presumes to call itself the 'government' of the United States. Under our Constitution, the 'government' are but servants of the people whose sovereignty is established by the Constitution itself. America is the people. And it is the GOP --not Obama and his growing legion of support --that hates the people of America and wages war upon them, impoverishes them, lies to them and, lately in the campaign of Pain-McCain, reviles them for daring to express the only truly patriotic position on this year's ballot.

Warming up a crowd in North Carolina on Saturday, Republican Rep. Robin Hayes offered the diagnosis that “liberals hate real Americans that work and achieve and believe in God.”

His remarks came shortly after he had said he would “make sure we don’t say something stupid, make sure we don’t say something we don’t mean.”

Hayes had followed Rep. Patrick McHenry, also a North Carolina Republican, who laid out the choice between McCain and Obama.

The McCain campaign will be remembered as being the among the dirtiest, the most racist, the lowest in US history. Hoping to find a crack though which they might slither, the lying bastards of the GOP have taken Obama's remarks about 'spreading the wealth around' out of context. They sought to FRAME this issue but only pointed up the fact that it is the GOP which has presided over, planned and advocated the 'spread of wealth' upward to the GOP base. The GOP has supported and effected outright transfers of wealth from all Americans to an increasingly tiny percentage of the US population. There is but one word for this: THEFT! [See: 'Greed is Good': The Death of an Economic Religion]

The re-distribution of wealth and income had been deliberate, accomplished primarily with GOP tax cuts, specifically those of Ronald Reagan and more recently George Bush Jr, the shrub who bankrupted the US with wars of aggression and other capital war crimes in Iraq. Bush's war crime was perpetrated on the installment plan with high interest. Clearly --this administration is already in default. Pain-McCain want you to repeat the failed strategies of the past. Pain-McCain have told you: just keep on doing whatever it is that is making you terminally ill!

The financial collapse of the US is tragic enough but complicated by the fact that Bush stole your money in order to commit capital crimes --crimes for which he could be executed when found guilty as charged. There is a place in the dock for Bush.

The GOP hopes to deflect attention from its traditional marching orders. The GOP raison d'etre is simply this: pass tax cuts and another measures that enrich the ruling elites far beyond what they might have achieved solely on merit. IF you are NOT among the top one percent of the nation, the GOP has ROBBED you under the rubric of "cutting taxes".

Thanks to GOP policy of concentrating wealth at the top, there are increasingly FEWER 'small business' people because small business can no longer compete with HUGE corporations favored by the GOP. The GOP has a vested interest in keeping the truth form the American people. The truth is: wealth does not originate with rich people. Every economist --even right wing economists like Milton Friedman --subscribe to an established principle --the labor theory of value. The labor theory of value has been the basis for almost every major economic theory since Aristotle.

The GOP believes the opposite. The GOP would have you believe that capital creates wealth. Bullshit! Think about it --if wealth had been created by the rich and, indeed, trickled down, the GOP would never feel 'compelled' to pursue its unfair tax policies. It pursues unfair tax policies because wealth does not and has never 'trickled down'. Wealth trickles up and the government always taxes it at its source, its creation! That's why the lower and working classes pay MORE than their fair share of taxes. The government is, in effect, taxing labor and giving capital a free ride. The government is the shakedown arm of the nation's tiny and shrinking elite.

But what’s really happening to the plumbers of Ohio, and to working Americans in general?

First of all, they aren’t making a lot of money. You may recall that in one of the early Democratic debates Charles Gibson of ABC suggested that $200,000 a year was a middle-class income. Tell that to Ohio plumbers: according to the May 2007 occupational earnings report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the average annual income of “plumbers, pipefitters and steamfitters” in Ohio was $47,930.

Second, their real incomes have stagnated or fallen, even in supposedly good years. The Bush administration assured us that the economy was booming in 2007 — but the average Ohio plumber’s income in that 2007 report was only 15.5 percent higher than in the 2000 report, not enough to keep up with the 17.7 percent rise in consumer prices in the Midwest. As Ohio plumbers went, so went the nation: median household income, adjusted for inflation, was lower in 2007 than it had been in 2000.

Third, Ohio plumbers have been having growing trouble getting health insurance, especially if, like many craftsmen, they work for small firms. According to the Kaiser Family Foundation, in 2007 only 45 percent of companies with fewer than 10 employees offered health benefits, down from 57 percent in 2000.

If because of GOP transfers of unearned wealth to the increasingly tiny elite of about one percent of the population, labor is unproductive or impoverished the productivity of the nation will decline and ultimately collapse --especially if the poor can no longer afford decent housing or food because ELITES have bid up prices on commodities.

Given the 'socialist/Marxist' nature of the recent bailout benefiting only the GOP base of elites, it is clear that Karl Marx was right. Capitalism will collapse of its own inconsistencies, 'internal tensions which will lead to its destruction.' We have seen evidence of this in the recent bailout --a 'socialist measure' benefiting McCain's 'base' even as McCain was demonizing 'liberals', socialists, and other "Anti-Americans".

The development of Modern Industry, therefore, cuts from under its feet the very foundation on which the bourgeoisie produces and appropriates products. What the bourgeoisie, therefore, produces, above all, are its own grave-diggers. Its fall and the victory of the proletariat are equally inevitable.

Karl Marx, The Communist Manifesto

One wonders if GOPPERS ever try to reconcile the irreconcilable inconsistencies that are literally shot through their thought processes.

Monopoly is a board game published by Parker Brothers, a subsidiary of Hasbro. Players compete to acquire wealth through stylized economic activity involving the buying, renting, and trading of properties using play money, as players take turns moving around the board according to the roll of the dice. The object of the game is to bankrupt the other players. The game is named after the economic concept of monopoly, the domination of a market by a single entity.